Books Update: Quarter 4

Congrats on making it through another year, you crazy diamond, you! This year I read 80 books & over 32,000 pages. We're now at the tail-end of quarter 4, so let's talk about what I've been reading over the last three months.

As you may or may not already know, I've been reading a classic a month for the last two years. It started as a one-year project in 2014, but I've enjoyed it enough to keep going with it & will probably continue until it starts to feel like a chore.

January through April

May & June

July through September

These were my last three classics of the year:

October: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oliver Wilde (1890, 166 pages). 4 stars. This was my spooooky Halloween read! Young, beautiful, innocent, naive Dorian Gray sits for a portrait for an artist friend, who proclaims the painting his best work. Dorian is suddenly struck by the horrible thought that he will age and lose his beauty while his portrait will remain beautiful and youthful forever. In a fit of panic he desperately prays that his and the painting's roles should be reversed, so that the painting ages while he stays young and beautiful. Not only does his wish come true, but the portrait also begins to reflect the condition of his soul. Creepiness and philosophy ensue. The writing is clever and gorgeous, and Wilde is a master of dry wit & witty repartee, plus it's less than 200 pages so pretty easy to knock out on a plane ride or similar. But, it is worth mentioning that it's still not a light read. Some parts of it are quite dense and heavily philosophical (I found myself carefully re-reading many sections because I didn't catch or process it all the first or second time around), so definitely something to save for when you are fully alert and not distracted.

Slade House, by David Mitchell

I really enjoyed this book but explaining why is complicated.

First, I should say that before Slade House, I read every other David Mitchell book except for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet*, I believe in this order:

The Bone Clocks (2014)

Ghostwritten (1999)

Cloud Atlas (2004)

Number9Dream (2001)

Black Swan Green (2006)

Though I was struck by the gorgeous and skillful language of all five, Bone Clocks was far and away my favorite. Soon after, I read a review in the NY Times where the critic wrote that it "felt like a misfire," with a plot that "felt soft and formulaic" and read "like second-rate fantasy fiction" (of course, I vehemently disagreed!), and that the recurring characters from Mitchell's previous books seemed “less like Yoknapatawpha and more like Marvel.” Not having read any of his other books at the time, this didn't mean much to me, but I did pick up on the fact it wasn't intended as a compliment.

Over the last year, though, I've read everything except Jacob*, so now I see what he was getting at: Although the books are all self-contained, they do all seem to take place in the same universe, with the same characters or clans of characters appearing regularly (sometimes as central figures, sometimes as cameos), and taken as a whole, I could sort of see Mitchell weaving together a larger story, each book existing in its own little narrative eddy. So it was unsurprising to me to hear that Slade House was sort of a sequel to Bone Clocks.

For better or worse, that was the effect of reading Bone Clocks first. It's definitely the most explicit, sprawling, lay-it-all-out, this-is-what's-going type of story of the six, and I can see how someone might not pick up all the connections if they started with Ghostwritten and read according to publication order. I also think maybe that explicitness was what some people didn't like about Bone Clocks, having become accustomed to the oblique nature of the books that came before. (Also, I'm a huge fan of what you might call "intellectual horror" or "literary horror" or whatever, which I think Bone Clocks has a lot in common with, and I can see maybe a subset of Mitchell's usual audience not really going for that.)

So. I say all that to say that if you enjoyed Bone Clocks, you are more likely to enjoy Slade House than if you enjoyed Mitchell's other books more and Bone Clocks less. It's short, apparently an elaboration on a short story he wrote called The Right Sort. If Bone Clocks flirts with intellectual/literary horror, Slade House straight-up propositions it. The story is divided into three parts and revolves around a mysterious manor house (the eponymous Slade House), with each part following a character as they visit the house and its odd inhabitants. Not all of their fates are happy. If you've read Bone Clocks, by the second or third story you see the connection between the two books and will probably figure out sooner than other readers how it's going to end.

I can see why readers who enjoyed Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten more might not be as big on Slade House. It's short and fairly to the point, not quite as literary, and more focused on telling a grizzly tale than on patiently and artfully developing nine-dimensional characters and abstract, highly literary themes. Still, Mitchell's skill with language and story craft in general shines through, which made it (at least for me) a satisfying, undemanding, yet highly entertaining read.

* I started Jacob in December and abandoned it after 100 pages because I just could not get into it. (Sorry, David Mitchell; six out of seven still ain't bad!)

Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff

Oh, man. I don't even know where to begin with this book except that it was amazing. I actually think the marketing copy included a pretty decent summation: Every relationship has two perspectives, and sometimes the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets.

The relationship in question is that of Lotto & Mathilde, madly in love and married at the tender age of twenty-two after knowing each other for all of two weeks. The first half of the book tells the story of their marriage from Lotto's point of view, and though the writing is utterly gorgeous and the characters dynamic and multi-dimensional, it's on the darker side, without much in the way of comic relief. The second half, though, is Mathilde's story, which fills in a lot of blanks in sometimes jaw-dropping ways. (Fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, this is why you'll love it.)

The genius of this book lies in the juxtaposition of the two voices, addressing issues of destiny, creative potential, and the nature & meaning of marriage. Not a light read, but beautifully & poetically written without sacrificing the authentic voices of the characters, and the complexity and cleverness offers enough relief from the darker nature of the story to make it brilliant.

Books Update: Quarter 3

Fall is finally here, if only officially (did I mention it's been 80s & 90s in San Francisco for weeks? Not okay), and as we close the book on September, it is time once again to speak of, well, books.

As you may already know, I've been reading a classic a month for the last two years. It started as a one-year project in 2014, but I've enjoyed it enough to keep going with it & will probably continue until it starts to feel like a chore.

January through April

May & June

July: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving (1990, 637 pages). Ahh, John Irving, you got me again! Sweet, depressing, hilarious, & raw. The story follows Johnny Weelwright (1st person narrator) & his best friend Owen Meany (tiny, brilliant, charismatic, & possessed of a bizarrely shrill voice) from their childhood together in a small town in 1950s New Hampshire through early adulthood, while periodically flashing forward to Johnny's middle age in Canada. The relationship between the two is weirdly cemented when uncoordinated, nonathletic Owen somehow manages to hit a baseball at the end of a Little League game that hits Johnny's mysterious mother in the head, killing her. After that, Owen is convinced he is "God's Instrument," with everything & every moment in his life leading to a single purpose. I think it's the sheer audacity & improbability of the whole thing that made it one of the best books I've read in a while.

August: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (1847, 507 pages). I think sometimes it's difficult to fully appreciate classics because the reason they are classics has mainly to do with the context in which they were written. Reading Jane Eyre for the first time in 2015, I have to admit that I spent most of it rolling my eyes & ready to chuck it across the room. Really? Really, Jane? It's so painfully clear that Mr. Rochester is a dire shitbird, and you are utterly pathetic for not realizing this almost immediately. (Though, I will also admit that she gets a little less pathetic as the book goes on, but he is still a shitbird, and their conversations are honestly kind of gross.) BUT, I do get that it was rather revolutionary and radical for 1847 and (kind of hilariously) was actually lambasted for being anti-God/Church (ie, a woman every once in a while having an original thought and maybe occasionally for half a second not doing exactly what some rando self-important dude tells her to do). Still, a part of me was screaming throughout, JANE, YOU IDIOT! DTMFA!

September: The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (1905, 335 pages).

Welp, I guess I'll go shoot myself in the face now.

The Jungle is about the trials & tribulations of a Lithuanian family that settles in Chicago to pursue the vast riches and endless opportunity that they have heard are there for the taking in welcoming, democratic, class-blind America. Lololololol. No but really, it's one of the most depressing books I've ever read in my life. I get the historical significance of this book and that the fact that it's completely and utterly depressing as hell is the whole point, so three stars for that. But when you have only one color in your palette (shit-color, for instance), it loses its effect real fast & you stop expecting anything else. Most of the other books I've tagged as "depressing as hell" offered at least a few strokes of other colors occasionally, if for no other reason than to provide enough contrast for the horrible parts to maintain their effect (and presumably to stop you from pausing to kill yourself). Not so here. It's shit sandwich after shit sandwich, and any time things start to look maybe-kinda not so bad for the protagonist, you know that a shit sandwich with an extra-crispy cat litter crust is just around the corner.

OTHER RECENT READS:

I have read a lot of stuff lately but here are the titles I most highly recommend:

The Ocean At the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman (2013, 181 pages). 5 stars. Beautiful, creepy, imaginative, & sad. Essentially: All things Neil Gaiman. More along the lines of Coraline and The Graveyard Book than Neverwhere / Stardust. Hard to explain any more clearly than that.

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk (1996, 218 pages). 5 stars. I picked this up in the airport because I wanted something short to read on a plane, & having only seen the movie & never read any Chuck Palahniuk, I was curious. Super entertaining & amazingly well-written & well crafted! My only regret is that I wish I'd read it before seeing the movie. I also enjoyed the afterword at the end about how the book began as a six-page short story no one paid any attention to & evolved into an international blockbuster. The question now is, which Palahniuk to read next?

The Blue Girl, by Laurie Foos (2015, 220 pages). 5 stars. A super quick, easy, fairly minimalist read, and at the same time amazingly, gorgeously, breathtakingly written. I'm not sure how you do both of those things at the same time, but somehow Foos pulled it off. A silent blue girl has appeared in an unnamed lake town; after one of their daughters saves the blue girl from drowning, three sad, middle-aged women with sad, middle-aged husbands, teenage daughters, and troubled sons sneak out at night to the cabin in the woods where the blue girl lives with an old woman to feed her the secrets they've baked into homemade moon pies. When the kids catch on, everything changes. Again, I don't understand how she did it, but these 220 dream-like pages weave together some of the most brilliant character development I've read in a while with profound narrative themes & symbolism. Not a wasted word anywhere. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

I'll Give You the Sun, by Jandy Nelson. (2014, 371 pages) 5 stars. This may be the absolute best modern YA novel I've ever read in terms of teenage characters who are actually believable in terms of how they think, act, and (especially) talk. It's also just a lovely, if bittersweet, story about a set of artsy teenage twins trying to navigate their own & each other's tumultuous lives in the wake of their parents' own issues, and manages to strike a nice balance of humor, heartache, sweetness, and raw teenage emotion without veering too much into melodrama (or trying so hard to ape modern teenage lingo that it's painful). Still a *bit* too much schmoopy in places for my taste, but not so much as to make me want to vomit (which more or less seems to be the norm with YA). A great read for 12/13+, but there's plenty going on for adults to appreciate as well.

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay. (2015, 288 pages) The story follows the Barrett family (out-of-work, hyper-religious John, his cynical, frustrated wife Sarah, and their two daughters Marjorie and Merry, fourteen and eight respectively) as Marjorie descends into (severe mental illness? Demonic possession? A desperate bid to salvage the family's financial situation?). John gets the local minister involved, who in turn gets the family a reality TV deal ("The Possession"), which in turn leads to Complications, all of which is narrated by eight-year-old Merry. The real genius of this book, though, is that it's kind of meta-horror. Instead of telling the story purely from eight-year-old Merry's perspective, Tremblay ups the ante by framing it as told by twenty-three-year-old Merry to a bestselling author who is writing a book about the events, and then interspersing those interviews with blog posts about the reality series "The Possession" written by a quirky & mysterious horror junkie. Because of the reality show, a lot of what happened is on film, but a lot of it isn't; there is also the reliability of Merry's memory to take into account. This all adds up to an undercurrent of uncertainty about what did and did not actually happen and to what extent was the situation was medical, supernatural, or faked by Marjorie and/or the exploitative reality TV producers. Brilliantly written, start to finish.

The Longest Date: Life As a Wife, by Cindy Chupack. (2014, 212 pages) 5 stars. I picked this one up after hearing a podcast interview with Chupack & finished it on a single plane ride. It's pretty short, and manages to be funny and entertaining even when she's writing about some pretty heavy stuff. Even so, she pulls absolutely no punches, laying bare just about every facet of her relationship with her husband, from their courtship as late-thirty-somethings to raising an adopted child at fifty. And I think it's that completely candid openness that makes it such a compelling read. It's not, "Marriage is hard work but if you pick the right person and really love each other and practice gratitude or whatever you'll make it through the tough times." It's more like "I'm the luckiest person alive!" on some days and on others "SWEET JESUS WHAT HAVE I DONE," and for her getting married was agreeing to stick it out, even on the SWEET JESUS days. (That, and coming to terms with the fact that she was a control freak & now had someone permanently in her life that she couldn't control.) If you've ever had a moment when you're like, "Oh god, why can't we be like all those nice, normal people who are super in love all the time & never have any horrible moments together???," this book is a great reminder that nobody is those people, because we are all real, live humans with strengths and flaws and history and baggage, and that's what you sign up for when you marry a real, live human.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, by Becky Albertalli. (2015, 303 pages) 5 stars. What a sweet, wonderful, (sadly) subversive book. The last twenty pages or so actually had me kind of weepy (in a good way), and if you know me at all you know how rare that is for a book. This and I'll Give You the Sun have reaffirmed my belief that yes, there IS, in fact, really excellent YA left in the world. Like all the best books (I'm discovering), the marketing copy just really does not capture what makes this one so great. Come down to it, it's basically about gay-but-not-out 16-year-old Simon negotiating all the usual sixteen-year-old orders of business (school, friends, family, extracurriculars, crushes, feeling generally awkward & out of place), but with the added wrinkle of an anonymous email penpal about whom he knows nothing except that said penpal is a fellow gay-but-not-out junior boy at his school. Hijinks, turmoil, laughs, and all the feels ensue. (Also, mad props to Albertalli for a) writing a gay protagonist (1st person) who is just a normal kid and b) handling the whole teen boy coming out / figuring out how to relationship in such an earnest, thoughtful, brilliant way, particularly for someone who, as far as I know, has never been a gay boy)..

Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff. (2015, 392 pages) 5 stars. Oh, man. I don't even know where to begin with this book except that it was amazing. I actually think the marketing copy included a pretty decent summation: Every relationship has two perspectives, and sometimes the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. The relationship in question is that of Lotto & Mathilde, madly in love and married at the tender age of twenty-two after knowing each other for all of two weeks. The first half of the book tells the story of their decades of marriage from Lotto's point of view, and though the writing is utterly gorgeous and the characters dynamic and multi-dimensional, it's on the darker side, without much in the way of comic relief. The second half, though, is Mathilde's story, which fills in a lot of blanks. The genius of this book lies in the juxtaposition of the two voices, addressing issues of destiny, creative potential, and the nature & meaning of marriage. Not a light read, but the complexity and cleverness offers enough relief from the darker nature of the story to make it brilliant.

* * *

Currently Reading:
The Fifty Year Sword, by Mark Z. Danielewski

Currently Listening To:
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Up Next:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
• A Night in the Lonesome October, by Roger Zelazny (because October)
• The Magician's Land, by Lev Grossman (last in the trilogy)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson (feels like a perfect Halloween read)

Taking future suggestions as always. :)

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, by Becky Albertalli

What a sweet, wonderful, (sadly) subversive book. The last twenty pages or so actually had me kind of weepy (in a good way), and if you know me at all you know how rare that is for a book. This and I'll Give You the Sun have reaffirmed my belief that yes, there IS, in fact, really excellent YA left in the world.

Like all the best books (I'm discovering), the marketing copy just really does not capture what makes this one so great. Come down to it, it's basically about gay-but-not-out 16-year-old Simon negotiating all the usual sixteen-year-old orders of business (school, friends, family, extracurriculars, crushes, feeling generally awkward & out of place), but with the added wrinkle of an anonymous email penpal about whom he knows nothing except that said penpal is a fellow gay-but-not-out junior boy at his school. Hijinks, turmoil, laughs, and all the feels ensue.

Really, what makes this book so fantastic (besides the fact that it's just really well written overall) is the genuine, believable feel of all of it. The kids sound, act, and talk like real teenagers and, like real teenagers, can't be easily pigeon-holed into the stereotypes that plague so much YA media (the bully, the hot girl, the nerd, the jock, the theater geek, etc.). High school feels like an actual, run-of-the-mill suburban high school and not like college or Gossip Girl or Saved By the Bell, which I feel like is something that adults who have not spent massive amounts of time in ordinary high schools with ordinary teenagers seem to lose sight of sometimes.

Also, mad props to Albertalli for a) writing a gay protagonist (1st person) who is just a normal kid and b) handling the whole teen boy coming out / figuring out how to relationship in such an earnest, thoughtful, brilliant way (particularly for someone who, as far as I know, has never been a gay boy). I basically want to give this book to everyone I know, so they can give it to everyone they know. All the stars.

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay

Last Wednesday I read an article on LitReactor called "6 Reasons Everyone Should Read "A Head Full of Ghosts" by Paul Tremblay". Apparently this book has been getting rave reviews by everyone and their mother since it came out in June, but this was the first I'd heard of it. I am not much of a horror fan so I suspected it wouldn't really be my thing, but LitReactor has often steered me very very right, so I read the article. And got the book the next day, and read it the day after that.

Friends: I could not put it down. It is for sure one of the best books I've read this year, and yet 100% completely different from anything else I've read this year.

I owe the LitReactor article a lot, because the genius of this book is not really the kind of genius that is conveyed easily in a two-paragraph marketing blurb. The story follows the Barrett family (out-of-work, hyper-religious John, his cynical, frustrated wife Sarah, and their two daughters Marjorie and Merry, fourteen and eight respectively) as Marjorie descends into (severe mental illness? Demonic possession? A desperate bid to salvage the family's financial situation?). John gets the local minister involved, who in turn gets the family a reality TV deal ("The Possession"), which in turn leads to Complications, all of which is narrated by eight-year-old Merry.

That's basically the setup you get from the marketing copy, and based on that alone I probably would have skipped it because a) not really into horror and b) sounds a bit cliché, to be honest. But the real genius of this books is that it's kind of meta-horror. Instead of telling the story purely from eight-year-old Merry's perspective, Tremblay ups the ante by framing it as told by twenty-three-year-old Merry to a bestselling author who is writing a book about the events, and then interspersing those interviews with blog posts about the reality series "The Possession" written by a quirky & mysterious horror junkie. Because of the reality show, a lot of what happened is on film, but a lot of it isn't; there is also the reliability of Merry's memory to take into account. This all adds up to an undercurrent of uncertainty about what did and did not actually happen and to what extent was the situation was medical, supernatural, or faked by Marjorie and/or the exploitative reality TV producers.

In that context, the various horror clichés and tropes click into place. Rather than making the story predictable and derivative, they add layers of complexity to it and enrich the question of real/not real/supernatural/fake, and give the horror junkie blog posts lots to dig into in that obsessive-internetty-kind of way that the best bloggers have.

Finally, the dang thing is just brilliantly written, start to finish. As the LitReactor article put it, there are no bit parts. The real conflict & tension in the book is created by the interplay between complex, three-dimensional characters with vastly different goals and desires and understandings of what's happening. (I was particularly impressed with how believably eight-year-old Merry was written.)

All that said, A Head Full of Ghosts will not be for everyone. There are some disturbing scenes that, while they make complete sense in context and are not played for shock value, will be deal breakers for the squeamish (and possibly hyper-religious). But if you're more concerned with a smart, tense, well-written story that hooks you from the first page, you might give it a shot.

Books with which [book:A Head Full of Ghosts|23019294] has things in common, but is completely different than:

• House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
• Night Film, by Marisha Pessl
• The Shining, by Stephen King
• The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte, Brontë

August's 2015 Classic Read was Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë!

I think sometimes it's difficult to fully appreciate classics because the reason they are classics has mainly to do with the context in which they were written. Reading Jane Eyre for the first time in 2015, I have to admit that I spent most of it rolling my eyes & ready to chuck it across the room. Really, Jane? Really? It's so painfully clear that Mr. Rochester is a dire shitbird, and you are utterly pathetic for not realizing this almost immediately. (Though, I will also admit that she gets a little less pathetic as the book goes on, but he is still a shitbird, and their conversations are honestly kind of gross.)

BUT, I do get that it was rather revolutionary and radical for 1847 and (kind of hilariously) was actually lambasted for being anti-God/Church (ie, a woman every once in a while having an original thought and maybe occasionally for half a second not doing exactly what some rando self-important dude tells her to do). Still, a part of me was screaming throughout, JANE, YOU IDIOT! DTMFA!

The BBC's "The Big Read"

The BBC's top 200 literary works, based on a survey of over 750,000 UK readers! I literally just found out about this & am now compelled to mark up the list with ones I've read (bold) & which are on my imminent 'to read' list.

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien - Junior year of college (too late; I never really got into it & the whole thing was sort of a slog.)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - I'm ambivalent about this book but I feel like I should read it just, y'know, to do it.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman - grad school

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - Summer between freshman & sophomore years of college

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling - Junior year of college

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - summer 2014

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne - Oh god. No idea. Middle school?

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell - freshman year of high school, mostly under the desk in biology

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis - grad school

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - just finished!

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - summer 2014

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë - again...just never been able to muster the enthusiasm

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - 9th grade, for school

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger - 2011ish I think?

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - 7th grade, for school

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling - junior year of college

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling - junior year of college

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling - junior year of college

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien - junior year of high school maybe?

Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy - on the list!

Middlemarch by George Eliot - on the list!

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving - just a month or so ago

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - 11th grade, for school

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - middle school, I think?

The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez early 2014?

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Dune by Frank Herbert - 2010?

Emma by Jane Austen

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Watership Down by Richard Adams - over Christmas 2013

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - 11th grade, for school

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Animal Farm by George Orwell - 9th grade, for school

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - just last Christmas

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy - on the list!

Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - 6th or 7th grade? Not sure.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck summer between 9th & 10th grade

The Stand by Stephen King

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - summer 2014

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

The BFG by Roald Dahl - elementary school, not sure

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell - 2nd or 3rd grade, I think?

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - earlier this summer

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - 12th grade, for school

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

Mort by Terry Pratchett

The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton

The Magus by John Fowles

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - 2008?

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Perfume by Patrick Süskind

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding - early 2014

The Secret History by Donna Tartt - 2005 or 2006 I think

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Ulysses by James Joyce

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Double Act by Jacqueline Wilson

The Twits by Roald Dahl

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Holes by Louis Sachar

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - just a couple of months ago

Vicky Angel by Jacqueline Wilson

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - 9th grade, for school

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Magician by Raymond E. Feist

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett - on the list!

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - been on the list for quite sometime actually...

Katherine by Anya Seton

Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Girls in Love by Jacqueline Wilson

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie - will read at some point for sure because Salman Rushdie

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome - After reading Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, I have to admit I'm curious.

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett - I started reading this in college & would like to go back & finish it!

The Beach by Alex Garland

Dracula by Bram Stoker - 2005. LOVE.

Point Blanc by Anthony Horowitz

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

The Illustrated Mum by Jacqueline Wilson

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - I seriously doubt I will ever read this one

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

The Dare Game by Jacqueline Wilson

Bad Girls by Jacqueline Wilson

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - this year!

Shōgun by James Clavell

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham - on the list!

Lola Rose by Jacqueline Wilson

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski - 2008 or '09 I think?

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver - People keep recommending this to me so I suppose I should just read it.

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - A friend loves this one so I may give it a shot.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - In one sitting, junior year of college

Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

George's Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

Girls in Tears by Jacqueline Wilson

Sleepovers by Jacqueline Wilson

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

It by Stephen King

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

The Green Mile by Stephen King

Papillon by Henri Charrière

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

Skeleton Key by Anthony Horowitz

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Secrets by Jacqueline Wilson

The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey - this year!

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - 12th grade, for school

Kim by Rudyard Kipling - After Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Declare, I'm curious to read this one.

Cross Stitch by Diana Gabaldon

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville - Let's be real, it ain't happening.

River God by Wilbur Smith

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

The World According to Garp by John Irving - on the list!

Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore

Girls Out Late by Jacqueline Wilson

The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye

The Witches by Roald Dahl

Charlotte's Web by E. B. White - 4th grade maybe?

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - 12th grade, for school

They Used to Play on Grass by Terry Venables and Gordon Williams

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - on the list!

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco - 2007, I think?

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

Dustbin Baby by Jacqueline Wilson

Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - I'll admit I'm morbidly curious.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - meant to read this one last year & got sidetracked, so definitely on the list

The Suitcase Kid by Jacqueline Wilson

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay - on the list

Silas Marner by George Eliot

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis - DEF on the list

The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

Goosebumps by R. L. Stine

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera - on the list

Man and Boy by Tony Parsons

The Truth by Terry Pratchett

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

The Once and Future King by T. H. White - on the list

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle - Oh god. 1st grade? Kindergarten? Lord knows.

Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews

I'll Give You The Sun, by Jandy Nelson

This may be the absolute best modern YA novel I've ever read in terms of teenage characters who are actually believable in terms of how they think, act, and (especially) talk.

It's also just a lovely, if bittersweet, story about a set of artsy teenage twins trying to navigate their own & each other's tumultuous lives in the wake of their parents' own issues, and manages to strike a nice balance of humor, heartache, sweetness, and raw teenage emotion without veering too much into melodrama (or trying so hard to ape modern teenage lingo that it's painful).

Still a *bit* too much schmoopy in places for my taste, but not so much as to make me want to vomit (which more or less seems to be the norm with YA). A great read for 12/13+, but there's plenty going on for adults to appreciate as well.

The Blue Girl, by Laurie Foos

A super quick, easy, fairly minimalist read, and at the same time amazingly, gorgeously, breathtakingly written. I'm not sure how you do both of those things at the same time, but somehow Foos pulled it off.

A silent blue girl has appeared in an unnamed lake town; after one of their daughters saves the blue girl from drowning, three sad, middle-aged women with sad, middle-aged husbands, teenage daughters, and troubled sons sneak out at night to the cabin in the woods where the blue girl lives with an old woman to feed her the secrets they've baked into homemade moon pies. When the kids catch on, everything changes.

Again, I don't understand how she did it, but these 220 dream-like pages weave together some of the most brilliant character development I've read in a while with profound narrative themes & symbolism. Not a wasted word anywhere. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

Late to the party on this one! I picked it up in the airport because I wanted something short to read on a plane (it's ~200 pages or so), & having only seen the movie & never read any Palahniuk Chuck, I was curious. Super entertaining & amazingly well-written & well crafted. My only regret is that I wish I'd read it before seeing the movie. I also enjoyed the afterword at the end about how the book began as a six-page short story no one paid any attention to & evolved into an international blockbuster. The question now is, which Palahniuk to read next?

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

This book had all kinds of features that normally make me crazy (whiney awkward young white male protagonist; teen inner monologue/dialogue that is trying so hard to be 'with it' & happenin' that it's painful; main character spending a lot of time not interacting with people so that everything that's happening has to be described through narration/inner monologue; lack of much dramatic tension). And yet, I was engrossed all the way through & just had to find out what happened next.

Somebody somewhere described this book as a cross between The Matrix and Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which is absolutely spot-on. (Late eccentric billionaire creator of the world's now-pervasive virtual reality "second life"-style video game creates a wacky contest wherein the winner must prove his/her worth by solving a series of riddles & tasks in order to inherit said billionaire's fortune, including the game.) I didn't rush to read it when it came out because I knew the riddles/tasks were all based on kind of 70s/80s geek/nerd/gamer/whatever-you-want-to-call-it culture, which I've had a decent amount of exposure to but haven't really lived, & I was afraid a lot of it wouldn't make sense to me because of that. But, it turned out my passing exposure was plenty. I feel like I got 90%+ of the references & jokes, & any I missed clearly weren't crucial to the story. Still, I can absolutely see how people who are/were really into all that stuff & have much deeper knowledge of the culture would find it even MORE entertaining & amusing because they've actually lived it & probably catch a bunch of stuff I didn't.

So yeah. It was super entertaining, & complex & clever in terms of all the riddles/tasks/challenges, & it's clear that the author put a TON of time & effort into getting all that right & making it work out. The story, characters, etc., though, are not super deep or complex (predictable plot points, fairly tension-free, ending never in doubt), which probably makes it kind of perfect as a "beach read for geeks." I enjoyed it & was glad I finally gave it a shot.

Go Set A Watchman, by Harper Lee

To quote literary agent Janet Reid (whose blog I adore), "I read the book this week (it was a necessity since so many people were talking about it)...I knew that lightning doesn't often strike twice. My expectations were reasonable to low." In fact I feel like I can write almost this entire review by quoting other people, because now that I've finished it, I keep running across things other people have said much more eloquently than I would have & thinking, "Yes, that."

Reid again: "I can see very clearly how an editor reading this suggested the revisions that became Mockingbird...Mostly though I think someone thought 'hey we can make a boatload of money here' and didn't give a single thought to whether it was something that should, rather than could, be done."

Christian Lorentzen of The Vulture: "It’s structurally clunky...Jean Louise’s disillusion is overdone...and it defies plausibility." To be fair, "For stretches, especially in the nostalgic passages, Lee’s charm is evident on the sentence level, and this is surely what made her editor believe in her." But still, "Go Set a Watchman is a lousy novel. Boring, sentimental, trite, and a bit ugly."

To the point of its being published purely to make a boatload of money, "The appropriate publication of Watchman would have been a scholarly edition issued a few years after its author’s death. The only person who comes out of this affair looking good is Tay Hohoff, the Lippincott editor who told Lee to start over...Had Go Set a Watchman arrived as a scholarly curiosity, however, rather than as a preposterously overhyped publishing 'event,' it would have taken its logical place in the ongoing debate about the racial politics of To Kill a Mockingbird."

Reid: "I don't think it's an accident that this novel came to light only after the death of Miss Alice, Harper Lee's sister, and after the author herself was clearly disabled by age and infirmity. Honest to god, this is as clear a lesson in why you don't publish trunk novel as I've ever seen."

In spite of all that, I actually did enjoy reading it for the historical interest, and I just can't get too worked up about people weeping over how it "ruined" Atticus / Mockingbird for them, because HI IT'S FICTION. You know, PRETEND STORIES about MADE-UP PEOPLE who are NOT REAL? Lee abandoned Watchman & started over with Mockingbird. That's the whole point. Enough with the melodrama already.

Besides, The Vulture article makes an interesting point about that as well: "For a generation or so, a contrarian club made up of a minority of Mockingbird readers...have been arguing that Atticus Finch was less a saint seeking a political miracle than a man invested in the maintenance of the southern Establishment...The Atticus skeptics were at first angrily dismissed by the book’s many, many partisans devoted to the novel’s fairy-tale elements...As it turns out, the people who claimed to love the book most were wrong, and the ones who took issue with it were right. All along, Harper Lee had a more tortured view of the racial politics of the era, and the region, than her readers did...The inevitable conclusion is that she diluted the political complexity of her novel for us...We weren’t ready for an honest picture of a character based on her father...To judge by the first outraged response to the news that Atticus was all along, in Lee's mind, a white supremacist, we still aren't ready."

(Update: I thought this article from LitReactor in which Truman Capote reviews Watchman made some excellent points as well.)

Books Update: Quarter 2(ish)

BEHOLD, for it is time to speak of books.

The year is now half over (I will dispense with any melodramatic amazement regarding this fact, I'm sure you've had your fill already) and lo, it is time to pass judgment on the May & June selections of my 2015 Year of Classics. (January through April selections reviewed here.)

MAY: The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy (1997, 340 pages). For a long time I avoided reading any books about India because I know nothing about it and was afraid none of it would make sense to me. But now, having read this one plus two Salman Rushdie books in the last 12 months, I think I'm over that. This book was depressing as hell, yes, but still a beautifully written story about the complications of families, good and bad intentions, and children making sense of a complicated world as best they can. The narration of the story is not linear but jumps back and forth in time and between points of views of different characters. It begins at the end and ends in the middle, revealing more and more details about people and events and their histories and futures each time it circles around, and still keeps you guessing almost all the way to the end. Not a light, happy, fun read, but not a long one, packed with gorgeous language, & brilliantly written all around.

JUNE (Russian Heritage Month): Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866, 545 pages). Though it was a slog at times, I'm glad I stuck this one out because the ending was actually kind of good. Also, most of the beginning was good, too! The middle 2/3, however, were just kind of rambling & difficult to follow. I was expecting this book to be at least semi-awesome because HELLO IT OPENS WITH AN AXE MURDER, but after that I kind of felt like I'd been tricked into reading a parlor book. Just way, way, WAY too many scenes of people sitting around expounding on various class issues & the like whilst throwing shade at each other. Can't bring yourself to read the whole thing? Read parts 1 & 6 & call it good. You'll get the dramatic/interesting parts without missing too much (besides some only semi-relevant subplots).

OTHER RECENT READS:

I have read a lot of stuff lately but here are the titles I most highly recommend:

Reamde, by Neal Stephenson (2011, 1044 pages). 5 stars. Like much of Stephenson's other work, Reamde is ambitious, complex, and features a veritable legion of three-dimensional characters. As with most Stephenson books, I was principally amazed by his ability to keep approximately nineteen bazillion balls in the air in terms of plot & character arc. Likewise, I'm always incredibly impressed with how well researched every single aspect of the story is. But what really made this book for me were all the kick-ass female characters. Like, more than one! With actual distinct personalities! Who, like, do badass stuff to move the plot forward and serve as more than love interests for the male characters! So yeah. Like Neal Stephenson? You will not be disappointed. Never heard of Neal Stephenson but like a really smart, complex, well-written action/thriller/international espionage story? Give it a shot.

The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993, 249 pages). 5 stars. I remember loving the movie when it came out & have always wanted to read the book, and I was not disappointed. Cleverly & poetically written, dark without veering into morbid/depressing, and utterly engrossing from the first page all the way to the end. (Also, now I really want to watch the movie again.) My first Jeffrey Eugenides & now I am curious to read more by him.

The Cider House Rules, by John Irving (1985, 973 pages). 5 stars. Fantastic. To me, this is exactly what young adult literature should be, except it never will be, because the idea of teenagers reading books about other teenagers dealing with actual, real teenage issues in a way that is not soft-focus or whitewashed or pulling its punches makes a lot of adults really, really uncomfortable. I mean no, I would probably not give it to my middle schooler as there is some pretty frank discussion of sex, abortion, & rape/incest (& a fair number of f-bombs), but having taught high school for many years, I don't think it's in any way beyond what most teens in the say 15+ range can handle. In spite of the sobering topics that it treats, the book isn't really about those things. At its heart, it's an absolutely beautifully written story about love (friendship, romantic, parental), finding one's place/"belonging," rules (of all kinds--explicit, unspoken, laws, etc.), and who gets to make what kinds of decisions for who, based on what, and why. Beautiful, meaningful, and tragically sweet in a thousand different ways.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson. (2015, 290 pages) 5 stars. A great read for anyone who's into the intersection of sociology and the media (particularly online social media). Jon Ronson explores the recent phenomenon of epic public shaming, wherein a person makes a joke that comes across wrong or commits some kind of deception and then essentially has their career, life, and online identity soundly annihilated by the masses. Using as case studies such pilloried figures as Jonah Lehrer, Justine Sacco, Mike Daisey, Lindsey Stone, and Hank of the Adria Richards developer conference fiasco, Ronson explores how the semi-anonymous group-think nature of the latest technology has essentially brought back a punishment that was decommissioned in the US hundreds of years ago because its effects on the guilty were deemed too horribly cruel. If you're at all interested in the how-is-tech-changing-our-society question, you'll absolutely want to give this one a read.

Night Angel (trilogy), by Brent Weeks. (2009, 1392 pages) 4 stars. I probably only gave this 4 stars because I'm one book away from finishing is more recent series, Lightbringer, which so far is an utter masterpiece of epic fantasy. Night Angel can't help but suffer a little by comparison, but was still a fantastic read. Deft writing. Solid, three-dimensional characters that you kind of love and kind of hate. Complex and clever storytelling that artfully weaves together all kinds of political and personal and mythological history and keeps you guessing throughout who is a reliable source of information and who is not (and to what extent). Dialogue that is smart and witty and tight, and just poetic enough at the right times without getting flowery and cliche. Some of the most intriguing & well-written female characters I've ever read in a book written by a man. And once the thrills start, they're relentless to the end.

Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King. (2014, 436 pages) 4 stars. This book was my first non-Dark Tower Stephen King experience. It didn't strike me as the type of thing I would typically pick up on my own, but the reviews were glowing & coming off of Crime and Punishment I was really feeling the need for something sort of beach-read-y. You guys, I could not put this book down! That almost never happens to me. At every moment, I just had to know what happened next & felt truly put-upon any time I was forced to tear myself away to, like, go to work or whatever. Apparently that Stephen King knows a thing or two about book writing! Who wouldda thunk!?! I don't want to say it's "light" reading (it does open with a psycho killer in a Benz mowing down a crowd of people), but it's not depressingly dark or overly violent or graphic. There are some tense moments but probably nothing that will leave you feeling sick or give you nightmares. Yes, there are predictable moments and more than a few tropes, but it's clearly trying to be a certain type of story (think "NCSI" or "Criminal Minds"), and that, it does exceptionally well.

Where'd You Go Bernadette?, by Maria Semple. (2012, 330 pages) 4 stars. This book is mostly told as a collection of emails, letters, notes, reports, etc. about a high-up fancy tech man, his brilliant, formerly phenom-of-a-young-architect turned stay-at-home-mom/wife, and their precocious thirteen-year-old daughter. Hijinks, crises, and coming-of-age-type situations ensue. At first it struck me as just sort of cute but fluffy YA, but somewhere between maybe half & two thirds of the way through, The Plot Thickened, as did the characters and their personalities and situations. At that point, I had two thoughts: 1) Hm, this is maybe a little too intense in the f-bomby / mid-life-crisis-ey sense for the middle school set, which is too bad, because 2) suddenly the characters & their situations go from kind of flat & banal & boring to multi-dimensional and considerably more interesting, & some really complicated themes are introduced. I feel like a lot of YA books tend to steer clear of darker, tougher, more adult themes (because kiiiiiiiids), which is deeply lamentable in my opinion. Give teenagers a little more credit, huh? Also, hilarious if you've ever been involved with a private school.

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. (2003, 500 pages) 4 stars. The premise seems relatively straightforward at first: Claire's husband Henry occasional becomes "unstuck" in time and spontaneously disappears, materializing into the past or future for minutes/hours/days at a time. The twist, though (not a spoiler), is that Henry first met Claire when his thirty-something self materialized in a meadow near eight-year-old Claire's childhood home where she'd often go to play. Because Henry's travels seem to sometimes latch on to particular places and times, he ends up visiting her in the meadow at different ages every few months or so between the time that she is six and eighteen. At age twenty, Claire meets twenty-eight-year-old Henry for the first time in his own timeline--her with twelve years of memories of visits with Henry at various ages and the knowledge that they end up married, and him knowing nothing at all. The author has clearly done a good job of thinking through even the most minute details and weaving all the questions (and answers) about Henry's time traveling that arise into the story. Some of the relationship stuff was kind of cliche & felt a little bit like a fourteen-year-old's naive ideas about what grown-up dating/sex/marriage/etc. is like (see: the entire wedding sequence, BARF). But, by and large I enjoyed it, even if some parts of it are depressing as hell.

The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hakins. (2015, 336 pages) 4 stars. I can see why this book appeals to people who enjoyed Gone Girl: the disappearance of a woman under odd circumstances, multiple first-person narrators, palpable tension regarding which ones may or may not be reliable, and more and more criss-crossing secrets hinted at and/or revealed as the story goes on. It's a good mystery and I thought the author did a good job cleverly weaving the storylines, timelines, and points of view in a way that kept me guessing for a good while. Most chapters involved some kind of dropped hint that made me go, "Okay, hold up, what was THAT about?" And sometimes she'd just let it sit for a few chapters while I was all like, "YES BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ____ IN CHAPTER ___???" If you like that sort of book (murder/missing persons mystery, multiple potentially unreliable narrators, cleverly jumping around time in time and point of view to weave an intriguing story), you'll probably enjoy it.

* * *

Currently Reading: Consider Phlebas, by Ian. M. Banks

Currently Listening To: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

Up Next: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin, and either The Ocean At the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman, or Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami (haven't decided which yet)

WHAT ELSE IS GOOD, YOU GUYS??

Reamde, by Neal Stephenson

I'm tempted to say "classic Stephenson," but the truth is that Neal Stephenson's books vary too much in subject matter & style to really nail down "classic" for him. But, like much of his other work, Reamde is ambitious, complex, and features a veritable legion of three-dimensional characters. (Even minor characters, when they get a brief moment of prominence, are well-written enough that you can imagine an entire backstory and personality for them and actually connect with them a little.)

The basic premise:

1) Billionaire online RP game magnate/midwestern roughneck/former North American weed smuggler Richard Forthrast hangs out with adopted niece/Eritrean former refugee/brilliant engineer Zula & her computer genius/dickwad boyfriend Peter.
2) Peter makes an Epically Bad Decision.
3) Aspects of Uncle Richard's game come into play.
4) Zula & Peter are kidnapped by Russian Mobsters.
5) International intrigue/thrills/spills/espionage hijinks ensue.

As with most Stephenson books, I was principally amazed by his ability to keep approximately nineteen bazillion balls in the air in terms of plot & character arc--I have no idea how he manages it. Likewise, I'm always incredibly impressed with how well researched every single aspect of the story is, down to minute details of government, technology, architecture, geography, and camping equipment. (Er, or if it's not, he's a *really* convincing bullshitter!)

But what really made this book for me were all the kick-ass female characters. Like, more than one! With actual distinct personalities! Who, like, do badass stuff to move the plot forward and serve as more than love interests for the male characters! In general, international action/thriller/intrigue isn't particularly my bag, so I don't think that it's an exaggeration to say that, as well written as the book itself is, if those characters had been male (or if the women had been relegated to damsels in distress-slash-love interests), I probably wouldn't have stuck it out for 1,000+ pages, because, look, men running around with guns and crashing vehicles and hacking the interwebz and zzzzzzzzzzz.

So yeah. Like Neal Stephenson? You will not be disappointed. Never heard of Neal Stephenson but like a really smart, complex, well-written action/thriller/international espionage story? Give it a shot. Scared of 1,000+ page tomes? Can't help you there.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson

A fantastic read for anyone who's into the intersection of sociology and the media (particularly online social media). Jon Ronson explores the recent phenomenon of epic public shaming, wherein a person makes a joke that comes across wrong or commits some kind of deception and then essentially has their career, life, and online identity soundly annihilated by the masses. Using as case studies such pilloried figures as Jonah Lehrer, Justine Sacco, Mike Daisey, Lindsey Stone, and Hank of the Adria Richards developer conference fiasco, Ronson explores how the semi-anonymous group-think nature of the latest technology has essentially brought back a punishment that was decommissioned in the US hundreds of years ago because its effects on the guilty were deemed too horribly cruel.

Ronson is an excellent writer and storyteller, but what really makes this book is how he somehow managed to get access to his case studies as well as hunt down relevant supporting characters from each situation. (For example, re: the Adria Richards developer conference fiasco, he not only interviewed Hank and Richards, but also one of the 4chan trolls who participated in the harassment of Richards. Now that was SUPER interesting.)

So yeah. If you're at all interested in the how-is-tech-changing-our-society question, you'll absolutely want to give this one a read. (Particularly good as an audio book, as it's not too long--7.5 hours--and narrated by Ronson himself, who I could pretty much sit & listen to all day.)

Books: Quarter 1(ish)

The 2015 Classics Project presses on. Here's where we're at so far:

January: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole (1980, 394 pages). 3 stars. Basically, if you enjoyed Don Quixote, you'll probably enjoy this as well. It is a sort of novel known as a picaresque, which means that the "hero" is a kind of self-righteous man-child type who indulges himself in all kinds of dreamy, selfish fantasies without ever learning about himself, taking others into consideration, or really developing as a character at all. The picaro here is thirty-year-old, early 1960s New Orleans resident Ignatius Reilly, who reluctantly tears himself away from his pages and pages of reflective journaling to take a variety of ill-fated jobs in order to to provide for his single mother. It's cute and clever and reasonably entertaining at times, but the picaro stuff does get old after a while, and I have to admit that I can't really see how it stood out enough to get a Pulitzer Prize.

February: The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison (1970, 216 pages). 5 stars. Last year for Black History Month, I read Uncle Tom's Cabin, which I did not expect to love but absolutely did. (Should be required reading for all Americans. Period.) It seemed like a good tradition to keep up so this year I chose The Bluest Eye, which I've wanted to read for a while anyway. It's the story of a sad, timid, eleven-year-old Black girl in 1941 that explores ideas of racial self-loathing & its origins, as well as the broader idea of facing rejection for something you can't control and what happens when instead of pushing back against that rejection, you accept it as legitimate. Short, sad, and beautifully poetic (because, Toni Morrison, who remains one of the most captivating writers I've ever read).

March: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith (1943, 496 pages). 4 stars. I read this one for Women's History Month. Five stars for being high quality, well-written YA fiction that I suspect would be meaningful to younger teens (and possibly even pre-teens?) without veering into melodrama; three stars for being just not really up my alley. (Then again, I am positive I read it about 20 years too late). So call it 4 on average. I feel like it falls into a particular sub-genre of YA whose theme is, "Life is hard, particularly growing up, especially for poor people, but sometimes good things still happen because FAMILY and LOVE," and those types of books have just never really spoken to me much. Also, I'm not sure why but I found myself constantly comparing it to The Bluest Eye and Angela's Ashes, and...well. That's tough company for any book.

April: The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin (1969, 280 pages). 4 stars. April is Women in Science Fiction Month, and everyone was like, "OMG how have you not read this?!?!?" An envoy from a loose federation of humanoid worlds visits a recently discovered humanoid world with the goal of eventually bringing them into the fold. This planet is unique in that its inhabitants spend 24 of every 26 days in an androgynous/asexual state, and then two days in what they call "kemmer," where pheromonal/hormonal interactions with a potential sex partner cause them to become (unpredictably) male or female. LeGuin wrote the book in order to explore what remained basic to human nature when biological sex was no longer a factor. I had kind of a hard time getting into it at first, but it picked up & ultimately was a good story of friendship, political intrigue, and two vastly different peoples trying to understand each other. It was a ground-breaking book for the time in terms of how gender is treated, and I give her a lot of credit for that.

The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

I remember loving the movie when it came out & have always wanted to read the book, and I was not disappointed. Cleverly & poetically written, dark without veering into morbid/depressing, and utterly engrossing from the first page all the way to the end. (Also, now I really want to watch the movie again.) My first Jeffrey Eugenides & now I am curious to read more by him.

Unread

(I am stealing this meme from bt, by the way, because I cannot resist a good book meme.)

bt's post about the "unread books" meme that went around in 2008 jogged a vague memory for me. That was not too long after I joined facebook & several of my bookish-type friends had posted it, and while I was well and truly over all the quizzes that purported to tell me Which Backstreet Boy's Left Nut I am, I was kind of into this.

The idea is that someone had made this list of the top 106 books listed in Library Thing as "unread," and then you go through & annotate the list as follows:

• Bold any books you've finished.
• Italicize any you've started but not finished.
• Underline any you read as a school assignment (optional - I did not because what difference does it make).

bt made an updated list for 2015, and going through the list to mark up my progress was way more satisfying than it had any right to be:

• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (262 times). Loved this book! But, it is long and not exactly a page turner, so I'm not totally surprised it tops the list.
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (254 times). Just read this last year & enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (227 times). On my list for this year.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (222 times). Just read last year; didn't love.
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (193 times). Just read last year. Glad I read it, but in the tasty vegetable salad way, not the ice cream sundae way. Funny but a tough read in places.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (190 times). Uggghhh I just cannot muster enthusiasm for this book.
• The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (183 times). Read in college. Meh. I think you have to be a die-hard Tolkein fan to love this book and I'm not, really.
• Ulysses by James Joyce (181 times). On my list!
• War and Peace by Léon Tolstoï (178 times). People keep telling me how worth it is but man, I just can't get up the enthusiasm.
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fedor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoïevski (173 times). On my list.
• The Odyssey by Homer (168 times). Middle school.
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (162 times). 11th grade.
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (159 times). I actually read this in Spanish when I took AP Spanish. I doubt I could now.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (157 times). This book does not call to me.
• The Iliad by Homer (157 times). 9th grade. Loved way more than I should have, I think.
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (154 times). Happening this year!
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (147 times). Meh.
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (146 times). 2010, I think? Weird.
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (146 times). Just read this past year. Not that bad, actually.
• Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (145 times). I am not yet ready for more of the strange, strange jelly that is GGM.
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (143 times). Another one that just does not call to me.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (136 times). College.
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (135 times). This year!
• Dracula by Bram Stoker (133 times). 2005. One of my favorite books ever.
• Emma by Jane Austen (133 times). #parlorbook
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (129 times). #parlorbook
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (129 times). 2006. Fantastic!
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (126 times). I know I read parts of this in high school but I don't remember whether we read it all or not.
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (126 times). Spring of my senior year, so not shocking I don't remember much about it. I should probably read it again sometime.
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (125 times). #parlorbook
• Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (125 times). I've read this pretty reliably once ever five years or so starting in the 8th grade (when it made *NO* sense to me whatsoever). In fact I'm probably about due for it.
• The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (125 times). On this year's list!
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (121 times). Just finished a few weeks ago. Didn't love every bit of it (a tough read in places), but really good.
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (121 times). On the list to be read at some yet-to-be-determined point in the misty future.
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (121 times). High school. I read all those creepy dystopian books.
• Middlemarch by George Eliot (120 times). On the list.
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (120 times). #parlorbook
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (120 times). AP US History.
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (120 times). 2006ish? LOVED.
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (119 times). 11th grade.
• Dune by Frank Herbert (118 times). I actually only read this for the first time a few years ago.
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (118 times). Ugggh I can't get into VW.
• The Inferno by Dante Alighieri (117 times). I went through a very academic snooty literary phase in high school & fancied this was how I would spend my summer. Hahahaha no.
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (117 times). This has been recommended to me so many times but the description/blurb/thing always bores me.
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (117 times). Not calling to me.
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (116 times). I know the basic gyst but I'd be kind of curious to actually read it. There are some, um, interesting connections to Lululemon, though. (Quotable quotes: "I was so shocked by being handed this bag today at your Portland, Ore., store that I literally WALKED BACK to return this horrific bag." True story.)
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (115 times). This is probably not happening, ever.
• Lolita (115 times). Vaguely curious because it's so iconic.
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (115 times). Trailers for the movie made me depressed so I doubt I'll be reading this any time soon.
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (114 times). Maybe? Someday?
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (114 times). High school, but I barely remember it so should probably read it again.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (113 times). I got this book as a gift & probably would not have picked it up otherwise. It was a tough read & didn't really call to me.
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (112 times). This year!
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (112 times). Maybe some day.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (112 times). 9th grade. A literary highlight at that point in my life. And probably still, actually.
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (111 times). I do want to read this because it's been recommended by so many people with good taste.
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (111 times). I'm trying to work up the fortitude to put this one on my "to read" list.
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (110 times). I guess I should read the book having watched the movie, but it just doesn't seem urgent.
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (109 times). Anansi was my least favorite character in American Gods (LOVED) so I am somewhat unfairly biased against this book, I suppose.
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (109 times). Just read this past year, AMAZEBALLS.
• The Once and Future King by T. H. White (109 times). On my list.
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman (107 times). 2008 maybe? Fantastic!
• The Aeneid by Virgil (107 times). Not really a priority.
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (106 times). This one I have never heard of.
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (105 times). Two words: Dog torture.
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (105 times). The marketing blurb for this book made me want to shoot myself in the face so that was a big fat nope.
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (105 times). Someday!
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (105 times). 2010, when I was way too old to appreciate it.
• Persuasion by Jane Austen (105 times). #parlorbook
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (105 times). Not bad but not obsessed either.
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (105 times). Uggggh VW.
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare (104 times). To quote bt: "Who does this? The COMPLETE WORKS? Pick some works!"
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (104 times). 11th grade. Should probably reread.
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (103 times). See "Atlas Shrugged" above.
• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (102 times). I guess I should probably read this at same point as it's just not all that long.
• Dubliners by James Joyce (102 times). Not too familiar.
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (101 times). Meh.
• Beowulf by Beowulf Poet (101 times). 12th grade
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (101 times). Ohhhhh so good.
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (99 times). Meh, doesn't call to me much (though I luvs me Kerouac cocktail).
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (99 times). Never been much interested in Stevenson.
• The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (98 times). Same with Defoe.
• The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (98 times). No strong compulsion to read this one.
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (98 times). In 2010 in Alaska. AMAZING!
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (98 times). This year!
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (97 times). #parlorbook
• Possession by A. S. Byatt (97 times). Not familiar.
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (96 times). This year!
• Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (95 times). I read this when I was like 12 so I should probably reread it.
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (95 times). Another one I feel like I SHOULD read but just not that interested in, frankly?
• Watership Down by Richard Adams (95 times) A couple of years ago. Did not really speak to me.
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (95 times). This whole trilogy is amazing, READ IT!
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (93 times). In college, in one sitting.
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence (93 times). I'll admit I'm vaguely curious.
• The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (93 times)> Meh.
• The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien (92 times). I tried. I tried so hard.
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (92 times). Another one I keep skipping over because it sounds so damned depressing.
• Underworld by Don DeLillo (92 times). Not familiar.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (92 times). Not interested. At all.
• Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (91 times). A tough one, but hilarious in parts.
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (90 times). Maybe someday?
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (90 times). I want to read this one someday.
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (89 times). I feel like having read "Guns, Germs, & Steel" & attended college, I could probably predict a solid 85% of this book.
• The Idiot by Fedor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoïevski (89 times). Not familiar.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (89 times). On my list.

#hellyeahclassics

2015: The Classics

I know, I know, this post is a bit late. So late, in fact, that 1/12 1/6 1/4 of this year's classics have in fact already been read (though none were particularly long).

After far too much synopsis-reading, page number consulting, nail-biting, spreadsheeting, and consulting of tea leaves, bird entrails, etc., BEHOLD! I give to you SF Road Warrior's Classic Novels of 2015:

JANUARY: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. "An American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, 'a huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter.' His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures." This is one of those books that shows up over & over again on "must-read" lists of American literature & I saw it on sale, so I figured what the heck. Review here.

FEBRUARY (Black History Month): The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. "Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, TBE tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, who prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, Pecola's life does change--in painful, devastating ways. What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment." I was extra curious to read this book because I recently saw an interview with Toni Morrison about it where she mentioned that she looks back on this book now & sometimes thinks, "Oh dear. There are a lot of things I'd handle differently now." Review here.

MARCH (Women's History Month): A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. "A poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness." It sounded depressing, but considering I made it through Oscar Wao, I felt like it couldn't possibly be worse. Review here.

APRIL: (Women in Science Fiction Month)The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. "The story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can choose--and change--their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters." Sounds interesting. And bizarre.

MAY: The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. "The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt). When Chacko's English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river." I started this book in college but now don't remember a single thing about it.

JUNE (Russian Heritage Month): Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, a talented student, devises a theory about extraordinary men being above the law, since in their brilliance they think “new thoughts” and so contribute to society. He then sets out to prove his theory by murdering a vile, cynical old pawnbroker and her sister. The act brings Raskolnikov into contact with his own buried conscience and with two characters — the deeply religious Sonia, who has endured great suffering, and Porfiry, the intelligent and discerning official who is charged with investigating the murder—-both of whom compel Raskolnikov to feel the split in his nature. Dostoevsky provides readers with a suspenseful, penetrating psychological analysis that goes beyond the crime—-which in the course of the novel demands drastic punishment-—to reveal something about the human condition: The more we intellectualize, the more imprisoned we become."

JULY: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. "In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys – best friends – are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary and terrifying."

AUGUST: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. "Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. She takes up the post of governess at Thornfield, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's passionate search for a wider and richer life than Victorian society traditionally allowed." Fine, I'll read a parlor book. Only one per year, though!

SEPTEMBER (Banned Books Week):The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. "The brutally grim story of a Slavic family who emigrates to America, The Jungle tells of their rapid and inexorable descent into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and social and economic despair. Vulnerable and isolated, the family of Jurgis Rudkus struggles—unsuccessfully—to survive in an urban jungle. A shocking revelation of intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards that aroused public sentiment and resulted in such federal legislation as the Pure Food and Drug Act." I can't really say I'm looking forward to this, but it sounds like one of those historical-significance-type books.

OCTOBER: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. "Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, 'a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.' Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment." Sounds kind of spooky, right?

***OCTOBER BONUS READ*** The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde. "Cecily Cardew and Gwendolen Fairfax are both in love with the same mythical suitor. Jack Worthing has wooed Gewndolen as Ernest while Algernon has also posed as Ernest to win the heart of Jack's ward, Cecily. When all four arrive at Jack's country home on the same weekend the "rivals" to fight for Ernest s undivided attention and the "Ernests" to claim their beloveds pandemonium breaks loose. Only a senile nursemaid and an old, discarded hand-bag can save the day!" It's so short I figured I should just tack it on to Dorian.

NOVEMBER: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. "In what may be Dickens's best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman — and one day, under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of "great expectations." In this gripping tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the compelling characters include Magwitch, the fearful and fearsome convict; Estella, whose beauty is excelled only by her haughtiness; and the embittered Miss Havisham, an eccentric jilted bride." Pretty sure I saw a bad film version of this in high school, but all I remember about it is Miss Havisham & how creepy she was.

DECEMBER: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. "Tells the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the story through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned." I remember watching the movie & enjoying it, but I don't remember much about the story, so hey! Reading books!

Other Books I'm Planning to Read this Year...

• Reamde, by Neal Stephenson
• The Ocean At the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
• Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami
• ????

(^ That's where you've give me your recommendations. ;) )

Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell

I have a new author crush & his name is David Mitchell. If I have to choose, I liked The Bone Clocks better because I really enjoyed the action & the deeper exploration of the characters (even though the story jumped around between them quite a bit), but I still really enjoyed Ghostwritten as well & didn't want it to end.

It was just as fantastically written and brilliantly creative, with complex, believable characters & dialogue, but the format is quite different. The book is divided into several different sections that are told from the perspective of a particular person & in a particular interesting situation. At first they seem unrelated, but as the book goes on suddenly you start to spot connections (sometimes explicit, sometimes just inferred or hinted at) between the characters and their situations and stories. I naively assumed that eventually it would all come together in some climactic "big reveal" where all the connections are finally spelled out and the actual storyline, the truth about what is Going On, is all explained.

But that's not what happened. There is an ending, but most things aren't fully spelled out. T he reader is kind of left to make sense of all the hints and inferences and put the pieces together as best as she can. In a sense, it was as if Mitchell wrote an entire book, including all the major plot points and main narrative and fleshed it out with fantastic characters and histories and inner monologues and philosophy and sub-plots, and then went back and took the main plot out, leaving you to interpret the negative space outlined by what's left and see whatever you see. A vase or two faces? Old woman or young woman? It's all in how you look at it.

Oh, David Mitchell, you are brilliant. BRILLIANT! Not to mention a hell of a word-wrangler.